This invention concerns a method for the management of a man-machine interaction system. It is particularly applicable to man-machine interaction systems with several methods of communication from the man towards the machine such as speech recognition, recognition of gestures such as direction of looking and at least one method of communication from the machine to the man such as a display screen or speech or sound synthesis. More generally, it is applicable to any interaction system that needs to process a large amount of data.
The efficiency and ergonomy of man-machine interaction systems can be increased particularly by using several interaction devices, and these systems are then called multimedia interaction systems. In particular they present consistent data on one or several common supports. These supports are well known to men skilled in the art. Operator gestures or speech are recognized by these devices that form man-machine interfaces. They send recognized information, for example selections, validation or commands, to a system that is usually centralized. The wide variety of methods of communication particularly from man to the machine, means that different dialogue modes are possible to carry out a given action. The result is a large number of events and dialogue forms to be managed. In this type of dialogue system between an operator and a machine, consisting of a processing system and interaction devices, a large quantity of data of various types may be stored, then processed and output, possibly initiating actions. In particular these data may originate from words, gestures or positions, and similarly they may be output in the form of synthesized words, sound signals or objects or characters displayed on a screen. They can interpret the operator's wishes and satisfy his requests by taking actions on the system with which he is interacting.
Generally all types of information and data mentioned above are taken into account by a single processing level. The effect of this is firstly long periods of data storage before being processed, and secondly the time necessary for this processing is too long considering the execution speed performances expected or necessary for these systems. These poor real time performances limit their expansion, particularly prohibiting their use to applications that are not particularly demanding in execution speed and in real time.
Moreover this lack of speed affects the ergonomy of multimedia systems by forcing the operator into unnatural interaction attitudes particularly due to the fact that they are not capable of following and processing more natural attitudes in real time, when gestures are fairly fast and they are mixed with speech and looks.